the Roots Of Obama's Rage (2010) Read online

  Yet when Obama was asked at a 2009 press conference in Europe whether he believed in American exceptionalism, he replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.”10 What did Obama mean by this? In a banal sense, every country is unique, with its own distinctive history, mores, and cuisine. We all know that Americans eat hot dogs, Greeks eat souvlaki, and the British eat horrible British food. But this is not what exceptionalism means. It refers to the claim that the rest of the world does things in one way and we do things in a different way. Our ideals distinguish us from those of other cultures or, as I put in it in one of my earlier books, America offers a new and original way to be human. If this is true, then it’s wrong to say that American exceptionalism is no different than British or Greek exceptionalism. Obama seems to be insisting, in effect, that there is nothing especially unique about America. Why would Obama, of all people, make such a remarkable statement? Something seemed terribly wrong here, not with Obama, but with my understanding of Obama.

  So I went back and re-read Obama’s two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Both are autobiographical, but the first tells us far more about Obama because it is not couched in political language. It was written in 1995, shortly before Obama was a state senator and a decade before he was a U.S. senator. Earlier I had read these books to discover Obama’s positions on various issues. This time I read them to find Obama. In the process I found myself plunged into Obama’s world, a world not of segregated lunch counters or separate water fountains, but rather a world much like the one that I grew up in: the Third World. As I read about Obama in Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Africa, I remembered growing up as a boy in the suburbs of Mumbai, surrounded by the helter-skelter of poverty and chaos, naked children running around, rickshaws and beggars, cows crossing the road. Sometimes I wondered how I made the long journey from the world of my childhood, growing up without television or telephone or even hot showers in the bathroom, to the world I live in now. How, I ask myself, did I go from the periphery of the modern world to its epicenter? Others, like the novelist V. S. Naipaul, who grew up in Trinidad and moved to London, have written about this.

  This is Obama’s story, a story of a little boy who emerged from the hinterlands and somehow was elected to the highest office in the land. Obama’s formative history, I realized, was crucial to understanding who Obama is now. And suddenly it hit me that all along I had been looking for Obama in the wrong place. I had been trying to fit Obama into some version of American history, and in the process I had ignored Obama’s own history. How absurd of me, since Obama’s history in important respects resembled my own history. What made this discovery especially fascinating is that Obama interpreted this history in a way radically different from how I see it.

  Obama’s story is both enthralling and incredibly revealing of his current motivation and outlook, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Let me just say here that Obama’s books are about three dreams. The first one is the American dream, and this refers to what the American founders termed the “novus ordo seclorum,” the new order for the ages. The founders sought to build a society not before seen in Europe or anywhere else in the world. They were, in this sense, the original champions of American exceptionalism. The American dream has been very good for Obama, making his success possible. But it is not what he cares most about; as we have seen, he explicitly rejects the idea that America is somehow unique. Perhaps for him the American dream is not very different from the British dream or the Greek dream.

  Second, there is Martin Luther King’s dream. Less obviously, this is also not Obama’s dream. Again, he depends on it. He campaigned as a non-racial candidate, and he counted on whites to vote for him or against him, not on the basis of his skin color, but on who he was as a politician and as a man. Without a realization of King’s dream within the soul of the body politic, Obama would not be president today. Even so, Obama is not fundamentally guided by Martin Luther King’s dream. The best evidence of this is that he rarely talks about that dream, and he does not seem to be moved or motivated by it. When is the last time you heard Obama speak with conviction about the importance of a color-blind society? If you go back and read Obama’s speeches, including his famous Philadelphia address on race, King’s dream gets short shrift. In this area, Obama’s actions are equally important. As president, Obama has done nothing to alter race-conscious policies or even urge that Americans get beyond race. Even as he benefits from King’s dream, he treats it with benign neglect.

  Finally there is Obama’s dream, and if you want to know what that is, all you have to do is look at the title of Obama’s book: Dreams from My Father. So there it is: according to Obama himself, his dream comes from his father. And who was his father and what were the ideals and values that moved him? I withhold the answer to these questions until the next chapter, but let’s just say that Obama’s dream, as derived from Barack Obama Sr., is very different from the one espoused by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. It is just as distant from the dream of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. In fact, to discover Obama’s dream we have to leave the American mainland and join Obama on his lifelong quest to discover his father and, through that experience, himself.

  When we go abroad, leaving behind familiar shores and signposts, we encounter a rich mélange of political and intellectual figures from all over the globe. We discover names like Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga, Kwame Nkrumah, Chinua Achebe, Frantz Fanon, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Edward Said, Amilcar Cabral, Wole Soyinka, and Aimé Cesaire. Many of these names appear in Obama’s books, although—for reasons that will become clear—some of them are deliberately omitted. Fortunately for me, this is intellectual terrain that I know well. Steeped as I am in the politics and history of the Third World, these are figures whom I have studied. This is also the world of Barack Obama Sr., and it is in this mental and moral universe that his son found his ideals and his place. Obama’s policies are incomprehensible without this intellectual landscape.

  This book will clearly establish the relevance of this body of ideas to Obama’s worldview—and a little detail here will set us on the right track. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes about being influenced by Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique, Fanon became a psychiatrist who joined the Algerian liberation movement, the Front de Liberation Nationale, or FLN. I’d like to quote an interesting passage from Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks, a book first published in 1952 in French, and then widely reprinted in translation in America. “For some years now, certain laboratories have been researching for a ‘denegrification’ serum. In all seriousness they have been rinsing out their test tubes and adjusting their scales and have begun research on how the wretched black man could whiten himself and thus rid himself of the burden of his bodily curse.”11 Fanon is writing about the North African Negro who is desperately eager to alter his skin color and become white like the French rulers of his country. Here, I believe, is where Obama got his skin treatment story. He found it in Fanon and altered the setting and the facts to invent a personal experience instructive about American racism.

  Clearly in Barack Obama we are dealing with a strange, complex man. Ironically we have ironed out that strangeness by making Obama the embodiment of American multiculturalism. Somehow we have taken this lonely, driven figure and turned him into an image of diversity. He is our Kumbayah man, our post-ideological president, an ultra-modern leader with a twenty-first century agenda. Obama recognizes this; he has himself commented that “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”12 As we will see, Obama is happy to accommodate these projections, which are vital to his transcendent image and political success. But whatever Obama is, he is not diverse or multicultural, at least not in his thinking or his fundamental values. Moreover, as we will soon discover, Obama is not even a twenty- first century man. He is fighting a private war that started far away and goes back to the middle of the last century, with roots that are even earlier. If we want to understand his actions in America and in the world, we have to understand Obama as he really is, not as we want him to be.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BLACK MAN’S BURDEN

  Barack Obama is a radiant figure on the world stage. He looks the way an American president should look, and he talks the way many in the world want the American president to talk. As a personality, he conveys dignity and calm; he seems to be what Aristotle called the great-souled man. As an orator, Obama is cerebral and yet confident, a man who is not afraid to occupy large shoes or undertake large ventures. Commenting after one of Obama’s orations, Newsweek writer Evan Thomas commented, “In a way Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”1

  Obama is also a consequential president. Less than two years into his first term, he has revamped the Bush administration’s foreign policy: no more invasions, no more preemptive wars, plans for withdrawals both from Iraq and Afghanistan, a new approach for punishing terrorists, and in general a very different understanding of America’s role in the world. At the same time, Obama has transformed the relationship between American citizens and their government. He has passed the most significant raft of laws since the Great Society: the bank rescue plan, the auto industry bailout, the stimulus package, sweeping regulation of Wall Street, a complete remaking of the health care system. In a way Obama has altered the political trajectory of the past quarter century: no longer is the American economy steered by the invisible hand of the market; now it is increasingly controlled by the visible hand of the federal government.

  Obama stands astride American politics like a colossus. All politica
l movements in the country are responses to Obama in one form or another; the midterm election in November 2010 is almost entirely a referendum on him and his policies. Whatever one might think of his policies and priorities, no one since Reagan has been able to accomplish changes of such magnitude. If Obama serves two terms, he will likely leave America a very different country than it is now. This is certainly his objective; he has set himself the task, as he put it in his inauguration address, of “remaking America.”2

  Obama is also a complex man, a fact often lost both on his supporters and detractors, who like to portray him in simple colors. As a personality, Obama is much more fascinating than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, or Jimmy Carter. Even Reagan, for all his accomplishments, was a much easier guy to figure out: what you saw was mostly what you got. Obama is more like Richard Nixon, a man of ambition and intellect, but at the same time an elusive man, an inward man, a surprise to see in the world of politics. He is a figure of psychological depth that carries about him an aura of mystery. Obama, like Nixon, would have interested Thucydides or Dostoyevsky.

  These writers would have been struck by the dramatic contrast between the two faces of Obama. What then are these two faces? The first is the face of the healer and unifier. This is the Obama who wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope, “We will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.” Obama promised “a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.” The same Obama spoke at the Democratic convention in 2004, in which he said, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America and an Asian America. . . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” That speech resounded with conservative themes, as when Obama described “the people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks—they don’t expect government to solve all of their problems. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and they’ll tell you that they don’t want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go into any inner-city neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.” This is the kind of talk you normally hear at the Republican convention. And when Obama was elected he pledged, “And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn—I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.” Let’s call the Obama who uttered these inspirational words Obama I.3

  We haven’t seen very much of Obama I in the White House. Instead, we regularly encounter Obama II, a very different character. This is the Obama who lambasts the banks and investment houses and forces them to succumb to federal control; the Obama who gives it to the pharmaceutical and the health insurance companies, bending them to his will; the Obama who demonizes his predecessor and his opponents, portraying them as the source of all the problems that only he can solve. This Obama pushed through health care reform, essentially establishing government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, and he did it without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Nor did it matter to Obama that a majority of the American people, in poll after poll, rejected the proposed changes. Despite Scott Brown’s stunning victory in Massachusetts, turning Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat over to the Republicans, Obama found a way to make his health care reform the law of the land. This same Obama seeks to impose expensive environmental regulations on companies in the form of cap and trade legislation; he is going to sharply hike taxes on business and the affluent; he is scaling back the military budget and has announced a withdrawal of American troops both from Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, as before, Obama can be expected to trample over his opposition to achieve his goals. This Obama has dismayed Republicans and conservatives, and an activist Tea Party movement has mobilized against him.

  So which is the real Obama? For conservatives, it is Obama II and Obama I is just a mask and a camouflage. So far, conservative opposition to Obama has been shrill, focusing on several familiar themes: Obama is not an American citizen; Obama is a pawn of radical extremists; Obama is an unscrupulous power-seeker; Obama is a Muslim; and Obama is a socialist. These javelins, however, have at best grazed Obama; they have not fully found their target. Was Obama born in America? The best evidence is that he was. He was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961. His birth was mentioned in two local papers, the Honolulu Sunday Advertiser and the Star Bulletin. This makes him a “natural born” American, as the Constitution requires of a president. No evidence has been produced that Obama is anyone’s pawn. Sure, there are radical elements associated with him, but quite possibly they are his pawns. Obama is certainly ambitious, and like most presidents he seeks power, but power to do what? Power for what end?

  I certainly don’t think that Obama is a closet Muslim extremist who seeks to destroy America from within. I realize that his first name, Barack, refers to a Muslim blessing; his middle name, Hussein, is Islamic; and his last name, Obama, is eerily similar to Osama. Even so, the charge that Obama has an allegiance to Islam is unsubstantiated. His biological father Barack Sr. was born a Muslim, and so was Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, but neither practiced his faith. Of his dad, Obama writes, “By the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition, like the mumbo-jumbo of witch doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of his youth.” When Obama lived in Indonesia, he attended schools with Muslim teachers and Muslim students. Undoubtedly he was also exposed to Islam as part of the curriculum. But he also learned about Catholicism. Neither made much of an impact. In fact, Obama writes, “When it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words.”4 This is a more believable account of Obama’s religious—or non-religious—views than conjectures that he was raised as a Muslim.

  The charge of socialism, now furiously leveled against Obama, seems to bring us closer to the mark. Here is a president who has no business background and very few people with business experience around him; as he goes about slicing the economic pie, it is not clear that he has any idea how to make a pie. As Jonathan Alter remarks in The Promise, “entrepreneurship” is a word Obama rarely uses and a concept with which he seems uncomfortable.5 More troubling, Obama is a president who spends the taxpayer’s money with shameless promiscuity. He runs up debt not in the billions, but in the trillions. Just when it seems that he has broken the bank, he proposes new spending. He has also increased federal control over major industries: the home mortgage industry, the investment banking industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the health industry, the energy industry, and so on. Never before have the tentacles of government reached so deeply into the private sector. Obama even woke up one day and decided to fire the CEO of General Motors. To his conservative critics, Obama is a kind of amnesiac. Somehow he lived through the second half of the twentieth century without witnessing the collapse of socialism, without learning the obvious lesson that socialism doesn’t work.

  Yes, Obama was around during those years, but as we will discover, his mind was elsewhere. Still, the charge of socialism isn’t quite right. Even if it could account for Obama’s economic policy, it certainly could not explain his foreign policy. Moreover, socialism as a description of Obama’s domestic priorities doesn’t really work. Strictly speaking socialism means that private property is forfeited to the government, and Obama hasn’t even proposed that. He isn’t trying to take away your car or your computer. Now there are other forms of socialism—such as the kind espoused by socialist parties in Europe—but these are nothing more than welfare state capitalism: the market produces wealth, and the government takes an active role in redistributing it.